History of the Freidman Unit

Astute observers in the blogosphere, known in the mainstream media as "dirty fucking hippies," have adopted the phrase "Friedman Unit" (or F.U.) to describe the duration of time the Very Serious People in Washington use to define how much longer we should give George Dubya Bush before we finally call him out on this whole Iraq Faisco thing.


The F.U. has become so accepted as a measure of time that it has its own wikipedia page, which can be found here.

The Friedman, or Friedman Unit (F.U.), is a tongue-in-cheek neologism coined by blogger Atrios (Duncan Black) on May 21, 2006. A Friedman is a unit of time equal to six months. The Huffington Post cited it as the "Best New Phrase" of 2006.


The term is in reference to a May 16, 2006 article by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) detailing journalist Thomas Friedman's repeated use of "the next six months" as the period in which, according to Friedman, "we're going to find out...whether a decent outcome is possible" in the Iraq War.

Tom Friedman himself has used the phrase at least 15 times over the past 4½ years.




On March 1, 2007, surge proponent Michael O'Hanlon said:

"There are good reasons to give the war effort, now almost four years old, another six to nine months before concluding that the current strategy should be discarded and a much different one…

In March of 2006, O'Hanlon's research partner Ken Pollack said there was “a critical six month window of opportunity to bring some form of stability to Iraq.”




The Friedman Unit, it'll save your ass when you have no other plan.